Editorial: Civil rights leader Carr’s message must live on

Friday

Feb 29, 2008 at 12:01 AMFeb 29, 2008 at 2:14 PM

It seems appropriate on the last day of Black History Month to pay tribute to the life of Johnnie Carr, a close friend of Rosa Parks and the person who organized the 381-day Montgomery bus boycott, which began in December 1955. Carr died a week ago today in Montgomery at the age of 97.

It seems appropriate on the last day of Black History Month to pay tribute to the life of Johnnie Carr, a close friend of Rosa Parks and the person who organized the 381-day Montgomery bus boycott, which began in December 1955. Carr died a week ago today in Montgomery at the age of 97.

Throughout her adult life, Carr remained active in the civil rights movement and, at her death, she still was president of the Montgomery Improvement Association, the organization that formed during the boycott and remains a vital force in the Alabama city.

Carr took a back seat to her longtime friend during the boycott and since then, but they both were central to the eventual success of the peaceful action that led to an end to segregated buses in Montgomery.

“She struck the match that lit the fire that started things a-burning,” Carr said in her eulogy of Parks, who died in November 2005. The two had been schoolgirls together in the elementary grades. They went separate ways after school only to reunite as adult married women and colleagues in the civil rights fight.

In her remarks at Parks’ service at the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, where the Rev. Martin Luther King once presided, Carr painted a vivid picture of Montgomery in the not-so-good old days.

“Everything in Montgomery, Alabama, was segregated,” she told the integrated audience. “I could not go to your churches; I could not go to your schools; and you could not attend mine.

“We knew that it was wrong because we were being denied the very things in life that everyone should have had an opportunity to have a part of — jobs, political work, and whatever you want to name that human beings should be a part of.”

Over the years, Carr remained at the helm of the organization that led the boycott. On several occasions in recent years when she spoke publicly, she urged audiences to look back and acknowledge the struggles and sacrifices that had been made for civil rights, but even more so, she challenged people to look forward because the job was not done.

Personally, she was a woman of great energy, even into her 90s. She was still driving at 97. “I can’t be still to save my life,” she said not long ago.

And so, she traveled to Detroit for another memorial service for Parks and spoke at that event, as well.

“Don’t come here, celebrate and have a good time, and go back home without carrying the message back to wherever you came from to make your community and your city and your home a better place for all people to live,” she said at the service.

Morris Dees, who co-founded the Southern Poverty Law Center, said Carr, Parks and King would be among the few people remembered as the shining lights of the civil rights movement.

Carr always made it clear that she and her friend, Rosa, were not out to make names for themselves. They just wanted justice.

She told The Associated Press in a 2003 interview: “When we first started, we weren’t thinking about history. We were thinking about the conditions and the discrimination.”

Until the end, she kept her eye on the prize, which she said remained out of grasp.

A few years ago, she said of King, “He would be pleased by progress we have made in the area of social justice, but there is still much more to do.”